Believes that the
United States, throughout its history, has been rife with racism and injustice

Says that "the Pilgrims were illegal aliens" who "never gave their passports
to the Indians"

Samuel
Betances, who holds a doctorate from Harvard University, spent 23
years as a Professor of Sociology at Northeastern Illinois
University. Describing
himself as “a biracial, bicultural, and bilingual citizen of the
world,” Betances today is best known as a professional diversity
trainer who got his start
in that field under former Chicago Mayor Richard Daley.

In
1990 Betances
co-founded Souder,
Betances & Associates (SBA), a diversity consultancy whose
training sessions
“challenge
members of organizations to reduce and eliminate prejudice and all
forms of discrimination in the workplace.” “When uniqueness
is respected in people,” says SBA, “morale and productivity
improve.”

Over the course of his career, Betances has
served
as a diversity consultant
to U.S. presidents, Fortune 500 CEOs
and staff, governmental agencies, community groups, law-enforcement
agencies, healthcare providers, faith-based
organizations, and educators at every level (from kindergarten
through college). His seminars and workshops
are designed to “challeng[e] negative mindsets” and help “white
males and non-traditional groups work together” in “new,
non-sexist and balanced systems” that “brin[g] cultures
together.” “Accept our diversity,” Betances advises. “Embrace
it. Make it work for you. Harness the rainbow.”

In February 2013 the
conservative educational foundation Judicial
Watch released video footage it had obtained of one
particular “cultural sensitivity training” session
that Betances had recently given to employees at the U.S. Department of
Agriculture (USDA). In
that session, Betances emphasized that the history of the
United States was thoroughly steeped in racism and injustice. For example: “[Some] Mexicans
came to this country last night illegally; never mind that the United
States expanded and took over what used to be Mexico. If the truth be
known, in a lot of these circumstances, if you tell some of these
Mexicans ‘Go back where you came from,’ they go to Texas,
California, Arizona.”

Betances also alleged that Amerca's
Founding
Fathers had derived both their system of government and their
national symbol from Native Americans: “And so when our
founding elders and our Founding Fathers said, ‘We don’t want
King George. We want our George Washington to create a republic with
tools of democracy,’ our founding elders went to the Iroquois,
native indigenous Americans in upstate New York, to borrow their
system of governance. In fact, when I met with some of the Iroquois
leadership some years ago, they say ‘Dr. Betances, not only did the
Founding Fathers take our way of governing, they also took our symbol
of nationhood, the eagle, as their symbol of
nation-state.’”

Throughout
the session, Betances instructed attendees to repeat
a variety of assertions that he made. For example: “If we work
for a federal agency ... we have discriminated in the past. Every
federal agency has discriminated against African Americans,
Hispanics, Native American Indians, and other groups.” “[I]f
you work for a federal agency,” Betances went on to explain,
“it doesn’t matter if it’s DOD,
Commerce, Labor, Education, Housing, every agency has discriminated,
because every agency reflects the values of the generation in
charge.” “We’ve got grievances!” he added.
“This institution [USDA], like all federal institutions, have [sic] not been
fair.”

Betances
also attempted to remove
the stigma from illegal immigration by instructing attendees to
repeat after him: “I want you to say that America was founded by
outsiders—say
that—who are today’s insiders, who are very nervous about today’s
outsiders. I want you to say, ‘The Pilgrims were illegal aliens.’
Say, ‘The Pilgrims never gave their passports
to the Indians.’” Numerous times, Betances tried to
reinforce his points by having the employees shout “Bam!” in
response.

“By the way, said
Betances at one juncture, “I
don’t like the word ‘minorities.’ How about ‘emerging
majorities’?” At another point in the proceedings,
Betances said that “white males” had been responsible “for slavery ...
sexism, [and] what happened to the indigenous Native American folks.”

Betances' USDA training session grew directly
out of a policy put in place by USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack, who in
April 2009 issued a memo
to all agency employees announcing “a new era of civil
rights”
and “cultural transformation,” and instructed the Office of the
Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights “to lead a comprehensive
program to improve USDA’s record on civil rights and move us into a
new era as a model employer and premier service provider.”

But
the specifics of this program were supposed to have been kept secret
from the public, as evidenced by an October 10, 2011 email
exchange in which USDA training administrator Vincent Loran promised
Betances that video footage of his training session “will not be used for or show [sic] in any way shape or form.” In
one notable correspondence, Loran expressed his love for Betances and
addressed him as “father.”

In
2011 and 2012, the USDA paid
Betances and his firm almost $200,000 for their services. From
2007-2012,
the federal government as a whole paid the firm more than $3.31
million—of
which $2.8
million came from the Defense Department.